As we mentioned in a previous article, Red Hat advocate Greg DeKoenigsberg claimed that due to the much larger amount of code it's contributed, Red Hat is a better open source citizen than Canonical, adding, "Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization." A Computerworld blog retorts that that's no insult; and that marketing Linux could be just as important to the cause as contributing code. Updated

Ubuntu has tons of corporate appeal. The engineering, the name, the color of the icons doesn't matter; only the ability to buy a support contract does. Linux Mint has zero marketability in the corporate world due to it being a community project.

Ubuntu has been good for corporate Linux. It's really pushed the idea that Linux has a place outside of the server room. There's not another company that does that. Red Hat sells desktops licenses, but they would really rather sell just server licenses.

On the other hand, Ubuntu hasn't done enough. They really need to start looking at the entire ecosystem corporations need. They need to make deploying and maintaining a Linux only network easy, and they really need to create a first class development package.

Linux Mint isn't being marketed to the corporate world but the name and color scheme would be an easier sell.

Mint has as much negative connotation as Ubuntu. "Would you like a mint, dearie?"

I'm not seeing major corporate rollouts of Ubuntu. I think it has been a waste of time for Linux overall.

Well you might have not been looking in the right places. And most corporate rollouts are not publicized. Though the problems with corporate Linux desktop adoption are more related to Microsoft's solutions being more integrated and complete, and have little or even nothing to do with names or color schemes. That is why Apple's good looking OS is a total failure in the corporate environments as well.

As JAlexoid mentioned and I hinted at, MS has a lot of support technologies that add value to Windows desktops. Ubuntu really needs to create an answer for them (easy implementation by unskilled admins) to really step up as the corporate desktop Linux.

It's funny as to how many people prefer Mint when Shuttleworth has a team of designers and Mint is mostly the work of 1 person.

Meanwhile, in the real corporate world, what matters is management tools that make deploying, updating and maintaining dozens, hundreds and thousands of servers and workstations as easy (read: manpower-free) as possible. Windows and AD and group policies, however crappy they are, do a decent job of providing these things to the average J-Random-DumbAdmin.

Meanwhile, in the real corporate world, what matters is management tools that make deploying, updating and maintaining dozens, hundreds and thousands of servers and workstations as easy (read: manpower-free) as possible. Windows and AD and group policies, however crappy they are, do a decent job of providing these things to the average J-Random-DumbAdmin.

... and a big part of appeal of MacOS X and Linux for random user is that those operating systems are out of reach of those management tools. No enforced virus checks.

Almost all the "corporate" stuff is in the intranet, as HTML applications anyway.